Notes from the studio
Writing
Notes on turning a photograph into something you can paint from. Mostly practical, occasionally opinionated, and grounded in what the engine actually does rather than what would be convenient to claim.
Making a guide
Which photographs reduce well, and which never will
Every tool in this category tells you to pick a photograph with good contrast and a clear subject. That is true and it is not usable, because it does not say what contrast means to the thing doing the reducing. Here is what the engine is actually looking at.
Does your photo leave your device? How to check for yourself
Local processing has become a standard claim in this category, which means it has stopped being information. The useful thing is not another promise. It is a way to check any of them, including this one, in about two minutes.
How many colours: what changes between 8, 24 and 48
Advice about colour counts is nearly always written by people selling kits, so it answers the question of which box to buy. If you are making your own guide the question is different, because nobody is handing you the pots.
Why your guide is unpaintable at A4
The commonest disappointment with a generated guide has nothing to do with the picture or the colours. It is that the thing which looked crisp on a laptop came out of the printer as grey mush, and no setting on the page appeared to be about that.
Painting from a plan
The two value test: notan before anything else
There is one question worth asking about a picture before you mix anything, and it takes about ten seconds to answer. Most paintings that go wrong were already going wrong at this point, and by the time colour is on the canvas the fault has become invisible.
Mixing a 24 colour palette from six tubes
This is the step that stops people, and almost nothing written about paint by numbers addresses it, because the kit sellers have no reason to. Generate your own guide and the legend is a list of colours you now have to make.
Projector, grid or transfer paper
The comparison between these three has been written many times and the conclusions are broadly right. What is missing from all of them is the failure that catches people on day one, which belongs to the method most of them recommend.
The same photo, the same palette, every time
A growing number of tools in this category describe themselves as generative. That is a real capability and it is the wrong one for this job, for a reason that only becomes obvious the second time you need to print the same guide.
Working with other people
One picture, thirty pupils: a session that works
A painting session with a full class fails or succeeds on decisions made before anyone walks in. Here is the whole set for one picture and thirty children, with the reasoning attached to each so you can change them for your own room.
Hexagons, triangles or squares
There are two ways to divide a picture. Trace what is in it, or lay a repeating grid across it. The second is the one that suits a room full of people, and the shape of the grid changes the result more than most people expect.